First Look: LEGO Indiana Jones

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The fedora and whip may be plastic, but he can still kick your butt.

By Chris Roper

Though it seemed like an odd couple when first announced, Traveller's Tales' LEGO Star Wars franchise quickly became a huge success due to its easy pick up and play mechanics and slick co-op play. Oh, and the Star Wars license didn't hurt one bit.

The crew is back with another LucasArts license, one that's about to be rejuvenated on the big screen come May 22nd. LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures is set to hit most every platform known to man on June 3rd, and aims to bring the same addictive gameplay seen in the Star Wars titles to Indy's journeys.

When you start up the game for the first time, you're immediately tossed into the classic opening sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Running through the jungle, traversing the ruins and its many traps and running from the boulder is all here and serves as your tutorial for future play. A number of new mechanics not seen in the previous titles become immediately apparent here, and helps set the experience apart from the Star Wars games a bit.

The first major change is that while character classes each have their own abilities, some characters also come with an item that you can use, like a wrench, shovel, translation book or something of this sort. The cool thing is that many of these items are also available in the levels, giving any character the ability to wield a shovel or torch, for example.

Item uses are important to solving many of the game's puzzles, which are aplenty. Thus far, LEGO Indiana Jones feels more like an adventure game than the action-packed romps found in the LEGO Star Wars titles, though that doesn't mean that action isn't to be found. Rather though, after dealing with any foes in an area, you'll usually have to find some pieces of a broken item and move them over to fix said object or something along these lines.

When you do get your hands tied up in a bit of combat, you'll quickly realize that this is largely a hand-to-hand melee combat game. While you're able to pick up guns or other weapons from fallen foes, most of the time you'll be throwing fisticuffs at folks' grills to take them down. Since you usually can't attack from afar, when an armed group of enemies come at you, you'll need to hop around and close in quickly to keep gunfire from tearing holes in your clothes. When you do manage to pick up a gun, you're only allowed a handful of shots before it disappears, resituating the focus back on hand-to-hand combat.

Look for things like fountains to lead to treasure.

With regards to the Wii-specific controls, Traveller's Tales hasn't done a lot in terms of making the scheme unique to the system. As was the case with LEGO Star Wars, you'll use the Nunchuck and Wii-remote for standard button and analog stick input, but you won't find any gesture controls of any sort. This makes sense given the practically identical appearance on every platform, but it would have been nice to have seen something take advantage of the unique control options.

As we mentioned, characters and classes of characters each have their own abilities (women can jump higher than men, for instance), but some also have fears that limit what they can do in certain situations. For example, (we named the dog) Indiana is afraid of snakes, so if you try and go near them he'll cower in fear. Likewise, Willie is afraid of spiders, making her somewhat useless around them. In these cases, you need to swap to another character (or have your co-op partner step in) and quickly clear the path for you. These situations haven't happened too often so far and are quickly overcome, fortunately, though they're abound enough to help give the characters a bit more personality. We'll see how this plays out throughout the entirety of the game, but it's definitely been an interesting twist so far.